The Woman in the Yard

dir: Jaume Collet-Serra

2025

I wanted to like this. I wanted to watch a version of this kind of movie and enjoy it.

You can’t always get what you want, though, and regardless of the Rolling Stones song that’s been lying to us for so many decades, sometimes you don’t get what you need either.

This was never going to be it. Not with this director.

The central question of the movie, being who is the woman in the yard in the movie called The Woman In the Yard, is a question that is answered too many times to diminishing returns each time. It should not be like that. Who the woman in the yard is, should be irrelevant, if mainly she’s meant to inspire unease and evoke terror.

Is this an update of The Woman in Black, who just happens to be Black, terrorising a Black family? I wish I could say it was. That story has an explanation of what the people being terrorised are going through, as in the reason for it. It tells those people, obsessed with a ‘logical’ explanation for something happening that’s supernatural, and they fool themselves into thinking there’s a way out of their predicament. A rational solution to an irrational problem. They often do this in horror films.

The beauty of it is that better horror flicks only use it as another rug beneath the audience’s feet to pull out from under them when the time is right. Vengeful, enraged supernatural entities don’t always care about when you’ve dotted your Is and crossed your Ts; they want to torment people for a need for vengeance that cannot be sated. Beyond Death, beyond all reason, beyond our desperate need for rationality.

This isn’t one of the better horror flicks, so the ‘explanation’ ends up being, in the immortal words of an ancient Saturday Night Live sketch, a floor wax AND a dessert topping! And yet in writing that I feel a bit churlish, especially in terms of how seriously it seems to treat at least one part of the story.

Grief, in case you haven’t experienced it yet, and it’s unlikely that you haven’t, dear reader, is vast, as you know. Guilt is terrible, regret is awful, lots of feelings are harrowing, but grief is… so infinite does it seem that it can feel like flailing in an endless ocean with no floor and no land on the horizon.

It’s the thing with feathers and claws, yes, and plenty more clunky metaphors.

In this film, perhaps at first, the woman in the yard is an explicit manifestation of a family’s grief. An accident claims the life of a father and husband (Russell Hornsby), leaving behind Ramona (the great Danielle Deadwyler) whose leg is still mangled from the same accident), teenage son Taylor (Peyton Jackson), and younger daughter Annie (Estella Kahiha).

Ramona is not recovering well, and lays depressed in bed watching videos on her phone of her absent spouse. We do not know how long this has continued, but it’s long enough for the power to have been cut off, and presumably a bunch of other bills haven’t been paid. When Ramona tries to get up on her crutches, she implores someone, presumably her Lord Jesus, to give her the strength to continue.

Would that it were so simple. As the son lists everything that has gone wrong that morning, they notice the mysterious gothic figure of a woman sitting in a chair at the edge of their property, looking towards the house. Her face is covered, but she hasn’t done anything yet.

Who is she, how did she get there, why is she there, what does she want, all good questions, none of which get answered for long enough or in meaningful enough a way to justify our time spent wondering about her. She will not leave and she will only get closer, over time, as the members of the house freak out more.

This is a tense situation. Mostly, Ramona doesn’t want to freak out her kids, but not only can they sense that something is deeply wrong, they can also see the woman in the yard, and ask questions about the woman in the yard that Ramona can’t answer.

Taylor wants to do something, anything, either to resolve the situation, or get help, or just something that will change the dynamic, of the three of them cowering in their own house, even though the woman in the yard hasn’t done anything yet. Every time he suggests something Ramona shoots it down with little explanation, or even any reasoning, which, as intended, makes Taylor more incredulous and more irritated with his mother acting so strange. And, yes, she is acting strange. It’s less about the presence in the yard, and more about… something else, her guilt, her grief, her desire to kill her own kids?

I don’t throw a line like that into a review casually. I loathe the very idea of it, and am uncomfortable when it comes up in movies, even horror movies. Sometimes it’s used well, as in, we’re meant to feel uncomfortable or terrified that something is going to happen to these harmless innocents. But this flick… it posits that there is this being out there, and she’s threatening the house, so all this ghostly supernatural / poltergeist stuff happens in the house.

And? Then?

For this kind of flick, it’s very well shot, on what I’m guessing was a pretty small budget, comparatively. The views of the outside of the yard and the bucolic surrounds is idyllic, and capture the dissonance, the unnaturalness of the woman in black in the yard perfectly. She should not be there. But she is. She is a wound, a stain in the environment, in what should be a perfect place for this family to recover, rebuild, heal. Yet she festers.

Basically, even though this is not a long film, they fuck around with nonsense jump scares for the longest time. Some horror flicks are nothing but jump scares, and that’s fine for those kinds of flicks: they neither require nor usually have emotional depth, or elaborate explanations as to why some entity is doing supernatural shit to a group of people beyond “they’re the ones that are there.”

Considering the set up, the dread nature of what this being is, doesn’t really make any kind of sense, not even a dream-logic kind of sense, since, yes, we get it, Ramona is overwhelmed with grief and guilt and is a danger to her family.

The woman in the yard, when she reveals herself, is played by a very imposing actress, being Okwui Okpokwasili, and she says and knows things only a supernatural being could know, apparently. So it’s not Ramona, in case you were wondering. But, you know, she is Ramona as well, because the screenplay never knows when to fucking stop.

So all three people in the house see this being, and have some jumps scares, even though... Using her shadow, she tips things off shelves or rattles chandeliers, which is, you know, a way to pass the time I guess. And she seems to have something against the chickens and the dog, for some reason, until she doesn’t…

But this being, this shade, this portent of doom, this harbinger, is not just one thing. No thing is just one thing; it can contain multitudes, just like people. The woman in the yard is not Ramona, but then it is Ramona, and then it’s not Ramona, but it is a physical manifestation of Death itself, and then it’s also Ramona’s desire to either kill herself or her kids out of delusional grief / psychosis, but it’s also like something from the other side of the mirror?

There is meant to be this last minute sting in the tail, a last minute reveal, and it’s something so stupid, so lame, that M. Night Shyamalan, Lord of the Lame Twist, would have rejected it as too goofy. It also, like large parts of the flick, isn’t scary, isn’t evocative, and tries to make something sensible that doesn’t deserve it.

Mired within that is perhaps a story that could have had emotional resonance, with all the best efforts of the leads (there is a somewhat climactic scene that is awful to watch, implying how intertwined Ramona is with this desire for death, as she seeks an end to everything in a very torturous way), but it’s undercut in such a way by everything that follows that it elicits shrugs, and not shocks.

There might have been a way to tell this story in a compelling way, but they didn’t find it. An hour of wheel-spinning devolves into frantic nonsense action, with an explanation that explains nothing and leaves us none the wiser to anything, other than don’t fuck with Death because Death always wins eventually.

5 times they could have just left her there, or brought her a cup of tea, and everything would have been okay out of 10

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“Today’s the Day! Today’s the Day!” – every day is the day - The Woman in the Yard

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31314296/